Mr. Reid, the last leader of the Democratic majority, was blunt.
“To think that he, with what McConnell has done to change the Senate forever, will go in there and things will just be honey dory, it will not be,” said Mr. Reid. “If he wants to be a president who is known for doing something, he can not need 60 votes for everything.” (It was Mr. Reid who ended the filibuster on most judicial nominations).
A range of lawmakers, from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to the left to Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware in the center, are reassessing their support for the legislative filibuster, by Mr. Obama, who used the funeral of Representative John Lewis to announce his support for scrapping the majority of 60 votes.
Many of Mr.’s closest advisers and former colleagues. Biden says he is still reluctant to burn bridges with Republicans. He is the same man, they say, who supported civil rights as a young senator, but still worked with the arch-segregationists of the House of Representatives, something he married about as briefly as last year.
“This convention gives you a very good sense of his belief that you can find common ground with everyone,” said Anita Dunn, one of its top strategists.
Recently, however, Mr Biden has suggested that the overlapping crisis requires the government to respond to the way it did during the Depression and World War II, and he told reporters that First Chamber Democrats “should look into” eliminating or changing the filibuster would make Republicans “obstreperous.”
However, in the same interview, he predicted Senate Republicans would be “liberated” by a Trump loss.
That was not his experience in 2009, when Republican leaders refused to allow their members to work together to improve the recent economic downturn or pass health care legislation. Instead, they believed that they could more effectively choose anger in the middle term if they united in opposition.
“If they choose to repeat 2009, and McConnell beats his hand away, then we have to make choices,” said Mr Coons, who co-wrote a two-part letter in 2017 to defend the filibuster. He added, “If we are there for six months and they block any legislation, then I am ready to re-examine my duty to defend the filibuster.”
